This video is of Alexa O’Brien’s interview with David Coombs, lead civilian counsel for Private First Class Manning on August 21, 2013 immediately after sentencing. An excerpt of this interview aired that afternoon on Huffpost Live and was embedded on Huffington Post. The next morning, 40 minutes of this interview aired on Democracy Now!. The following is Alexa’s interview with David in its entirety available for embed or download. We welcome bloggers and media outlets to use this footage as it is the only comprehensive long-form interview with Manning’s counsel and sheds an important light on one of the most historic and heartbreaking cases of whistleblower prosecution to date.

As Judge Denise Lind handed down a sentence of 35 years to Private First Class Manning the press pool was already framing the narrative of how the sentence would be reported upon from that moment forward. The prospect of Manning being paroled after 7 years (a hopeful one at best), words like “leniency”, and a misplaced infatuation with Manning’s private life started to bloat and leave little room for the ugly truth. Namely, that a young whistleblower who exposed war crimes was sentenced to decades in prison. A sentence which relied in part on a draconian application of the 1917 espionage act. This reflex by the media to eschew the complexities and embrace convenient or sensational headlines is why an interview with Manning’s Attorney on his terms with the journalist of his choosing was so important.

REGARDING THE USE OF MALE PRONOUNS

During the pretrial proceedings, court martial and sentencing of Pfc. Manning, Chelsea requested to be identified as Bradley and addressed using the male pronoun. In a letter embargoed for August 21, 2013 Chelsea proclaimed that she is female and wished to be addressed from that moment forward as Chelsea E. Manning. This interview pre-dates Chelsea’s public announcement.

Dutch mainstream media had a little circle jerk this week, celebrating that Jamie Kirchick outed Russia Today as a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin and Putin in particular. Toting rainbow suspenders Kirchick blasted RT for ignoring Russia’s anti-gay law. Never mind that RT in fact never ignored that law, never mind that Kirchik was invited to talk about Manning. Never mind that Kirchick abused his invitation to speak his masters voice. And above all, never mind that Kirchick is in fact a transphobic piece of shit.

Kirchick is not a human rights activist, he is a zionist. A mouthpiece for apartheid, a rabid lover of Israel, a state famous for selling perfect tools of death and desctruction which have been tested over and over again on the population of Palestine. The people in Gaza are not only held in an open air concentration camp, they are test subjects for the police state. Kirchick’s idea of human rights is might makes right. Kirchick is an advocate of perpetual war and nothing else.

And it does not stop there. To understand what makes Kirchick tick, we have to go back a year, to an article he wrote in 2012. “Why the LGBT community shouldn’t honor this man’s treachery” in which he argues that LGBT’s should strive to give Manning the maximum penalty. Which in the United States means capital punishment. Kirchick’s point of view is that Manning should be executed for exposing the war crimes that followed an illegal invasion. O my. How about talking about the use of depleted uranianum, mr Kirchick, let’s talk about the birth defects that plague Iraq. Have you found those weapons of mass destruction yet? Or don’t you want to talk about that either? I guessed so. You sir, Jamie Kirchick, are the pot which calls the kettle black. Please kill yourself.